


Further Up and Further In

by follow_the_sun



Category: Agent Carter (TV), Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: Gen, Narnia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-27
Updated: 2016-03-27
Packaged: 2018-05-29 11:57:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6373819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/follow_the_sun/pseuds/follow_the_sun
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Where are we going?"</p><p>"Where people like us always go."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Further Up and Further In

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [i've heard you're a crack shot](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4148868) by [beradan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/beradan/pseuds/beradan). 



Peggy Carter opens her eyes and sees a landscape dyed pink and orange by the sunrise. For a moment, she’s disoriented; she’s sure she didn’t fall asleep outdoors. Then she decides she simply doesn’t care, and stands up. There’s something odd about the motion; it’s too easy, too quick. Then she looks down, and she realizes that she’s standing in a young woman’s body, dressed in a uniform jacket with gold buttons and an SSR insignia pin on each lapel, and trousers tucked into army boots.

She knows, without having to check, that her hair is in victory rolls and her lipstick is very red.

“Ah,” she says aloud. “I suppose I’ve died, then.”

She isn’t expecting an answer. She certainly isn’t expecting a laugh from behind her.

It’s been a day of surprises, and so, perhaps, it shouldn’t be a surprise at all that she turns and sees Susan Pevensie.

 

Peggy has seen Susan in many situations, which means she’s also seen her in many uniforms. She was one of the best agents S.H.I.E.L.D. ever recruited; both her career and their friendship spanned decades, and when she passed away unexpectedly—in her sleep, in 1996; not everyone has Peggy’s longevity, more’s the pity—Peggy felt her loss keenly, not only as a friend and one of the few women who’d been there nearly as long as she, but as the de facto head of the European branch of the agency. Like Peggy, Susan was always a study in contradictions. She’s seen Susan weep over the death of a field agent she never met, but still coolly order men to their deaths when it was necessary. Someone so gentle shouldn’t have been able to make such difficult calls so consistently and so well, and not even Peggy had expected her to be such an effective leader, but that was always the puzzle of Susan. As soon as you thought you had a read on her, she showed you another facet, something gleaming and unexpected. Peggy never got to the heart of her, and in a way, she was always glad about that. A woman is entitled to her secrets.

Still, she never would have imagined Susan would appear to her as a young woman, barely out of her teens, dressed in a flowing red gown with a bodice of leather and fine chainmail overtop, a longbow in her hands and a quiver of arrows at her back.

“Agent Carter,” she says. “It’s so good to see you again.”

 

They seem to be somewhere in the mountains, a more temperate range than the cold European terrain Peggy’s body remembers. The forest is overwhelmingly green, the sky blue, the landscape dotted with jewel-like flowers; there’s a lake so clear she can hardly tell reflection from reality until Susan dips her hand into the water to take a drink, then motions for Peggy to do the same. She looks at herself, reflected, and realizes: she’s not so young. Her body is as hale and strong as it ever was, and her face has lost the lines of age and pain, but she’s kept the experience, the—if she may flatter herself—the lifetime’s wisdom.

Her mind has been full of holes for years, but she feels clearer and sharper than ever now, and all of her weariness has fallen away. Even the losses—even _Steve’s_ loss, twice now, first when he had to leave her in 1945, and again in 2016, when she had to leave him in a cold world with so much grief and so little she could do to temper it—have compressed inside her to something beautiful, like carbon into diamonds.

It’s clear to her that she’s been brought here for a purpose, but this place is so lovely, it seems like it would be a travesty to ruin it with too many words. She waits for Susan to speak, instead, and eventually, Susan does.

“I used to come here as a child,” she says. “In a very real way, I grew up here. But it always came to an end. I always had to go home. The last time, we were told we couldn’t keep coming back. Peter—my brother Peter—he misunderstood, of course. He thought it was because we were getting too old for this place, but that wasn’t it at all. It was a graduation. It was our version of leaving the S.H.I.E.L.D. academy and going into the field. Then there was a terrible train accident, in 1949. Maybe you remember it?”

“You lost your family,” Peggy says. “Nearly everyone you had in the world. We had it in our files when we recruited you, of course. People thought that was your secret, and it was a tragedy, certainly, but you came out of it so much stronger. I always wondered if there was something more.”

“There was so much more. You see, I lost my brothers and sister a long time before the crash. They wanted to cling to something that was past its time. I finally convinced them that I’d given up believing in this place because it was easier than convincing them that we couldn’t keep longing for Narnia forever. There were so many other things we were meant to do, and it was such a waste of everything we’d learned here if we didn’t carry those lessons back to our own world. I think that maybe I was the only one who learned what we were all meant to, here. But the others—they actually thought I’d been shut out forever. That all of them had been judged worthy except me.” Unexpectedly, Susan laughs. “Banned. Forbidden. Too shallow, too self-absorbed, losing my soul for frivolous things like lipstick and stockings.”

“Well, you and I both know those things aren’t always so frivolous, don’t we,” Peggy says, smiling.

“Yes. Women have always used what we had to hand, and we always found we could do more with it than we thought we could,” Susan says, returning her smile. “Anyhow, you’d think people would learn not to claim they speak for Aslan, because the truth is, Aslan never said any of those things about me. What Aslan said was, ‘Once a King or Queen in Narnia, always a King or Queen in Narnia.’”

“Aslan,” Peggy repeats. The name sounds familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. Is it possible that it’s a name some part of her has known her whole life, but that she’s never heard until now? “Am I going to I meet this man?”

“Oh, Peggy,” Susan says, laughing, “you and I have both served under _men_ before. It’s time for you to let yourself think bigger. The job you and I were brought here to do will be so hard—we’ll both think it’s impossible, we’ll both think we’re going to break. But we’ll do what we’ve both always done. We’ll get up, and we’ll keep going, and we’ll win. And we’ll never run out of worlds to save. For people like you and me, there’s no greater reward than that.” She holds out her hand. “My friends are coming to join us. Are you ready?”

Peggy follows Susan’s eyes. There are—beings—coming out of the forest now, unlike anything she’s ever seen before. Animals walking upright on two legs, with gleaming intelligence in their eyes; willowy not-quite-human forms that flow like water or burn like fire or sway in the wind like tall grass; things that look like—but can’t really be, can they?—creatures out of legend, like centaurs and unicorns.

Peggy Carter, who used to slay dragons with her brother’s wooden sword, finds herself smiling in absolute delight. She thought she’d seen it all, but the world can still surprise her. It’s all so much stranger than she ever imagined, and so much wilder, and so much better. “Where are we going?” she asks, taking Susan’s hand.

“Where people like us always go,” Susan tells her. “Further up and further in.”

**Author's Note:**

> Well, I swore up, down, and sideways that I was never going to write on the Problem of Susan, but it's Easter and [Beradan](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4148868) inspired me and so, here it is. :)
> 
> [The Tumblr post for this fic is [here](http://follow-the-sun-fanfic.tumblr.com/post/146676098360/further-up-and-further-in-followthesun).]


End file.
